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Gorz, André 1999, 'Moving beyond the wage-based society' in Gorz, André & Turner, Chris (trans.), Reclaiming
work : beyond the wage-based society, Polity Press, Cambridge, UK, pp. 72-111.

Moving eyond
Wage-Based Society
MULTI-ACTIVITY AS A KEY SOCIAL ISSUE
The imperative need for a sufficient, regular income is one thing.
The need to act, to strive, to test oneself against others and be appre-
ciated by them is quite another. Capitalism systematically links the
two, conflates them, and upon that conflation establishes capital's
power and its ideological hold on people's minds. It admits no activ-
ity which is not 'work', done to order and paid for by those order-
ing it. It admits no regular income that is not earned from 'work'.
The imperative need for a regular income is used to persuade people of
their 'imperative need to work'. The need to act, to strive, to be appre-
ciated is used to persuade people that they need to be paid for what-
ever they do.
Because social production (both of the necessary and of the
superfluous) demands less and less work and distributes less and less
in wages, it is becoming increasingly difficult to obtain a sufficient,
regular income from paid work. In 'capital-speak', this difficulty is
attributed to the 'shortage of work'. This masks the real situation.
The actual problem is not a shortage of work, but a failure to dis-
tribute the wealth which is now produced by capital employing
fewer and fewer workers.
The remedy for this situation is clearly not to 'create work', but
to distribute optimally all the socially necessary work and all the
socially produced wealth. The effect of this will be that what cap-
Moving Beyond Wage-Based Society 73
italism has artificially conflated can once again be put asunder: the
right to a sufficient, regular income will no longer have to depend
on the permanent occupation of a steady job. The need to act, strive
and be appreciated by others will no longer have to take the form
of paid work done to order. Such work will take up less and less time
in the life of society and in everyone's lives. People will be able to
divide their lives between a wide range of activities, which will have
neither payment nor profitability as their necessary condition or goal.
Social relations, co-operative bonds and the meaning of each life will
be mainly produced by these activities which do not valorize capital.
Working time will cease to be the dominant social time.
These are, put very broadly, the outlines of the society and the
civilization which are struggling to be born beyond the wage-based
society. They correspond to the cultural changes which are currently
taking place. They correspond to the aspiration for a multi-active life
within which each person can give work its limited place, instead of
relegating 'life' to the limited time allowed for it by the constraints
of 'work'. However, this new scenario presupposes a political break
equal to the ideological break the current cultural changes confus-
edly reflect. It presupposes that the need to act and be socially rec-
ognized succeed in freeing itself from paid 'work' done to order; that
work free itself from the domination of capital; that persons free
themselves from the domination of work to fulfil themselves in the
wide range of their varied activities. In short, it presupposes that an
end be put to the conflation on which capital bases its ideological
grip and its power.
The heart of the problem and the stakes in the central conflict
can be summed up in the following alternative: either work can be
integrated into a multi-active life as one of its components, or multi-
activity can be integrated into 'work' as one of its forms. Either
working time can be integrated into the differentiated temporality
of a multi-dimensional life, in keeping with current dominant cul-
tural aspirations, or the rhythms of life can be subjected to capital's
need for profitability and companies' need for 'flexibility'. In a word,
we can either subordinate the apparatus and the social process of
production to the power of living activities, or we can enslave those
activities the more completely to that apparatus and that process.
Behind the question of power over time, it is power tout court that
is at issue: the distribution of power throughout society, and the
direction in which society is to move. Rights over time; over periods
74 Moving Beyond Wage-Based Society
of time for diversified activity, are the stakes in a cultural conflict
which inevitably spills over into a political conflict.
That conflict is not a new one. What is new is that it is tending
to become both inevitable and central. The multi-activity to which
a majority of working people aspire 'culturally' does not merely cor-
respond to their individual and private desires and aspirations. It
is not simply the form taken by individuals' aspirations towards
autonomy. It is the subjectivization of a capacity for autonomy which
the 'economy of the immaterial' - and companies themselves -
demand of personnel. It is that capacity for autonomy which, in the
aspiration towards multi-activity, working people are tending to
claim for themselves, beyond the limits their companies set for it
and beyond the need those companies have of it. The power strug-
gle then becomes inevitable and relates to the status of that auton-
omy and its scope- autonomy's rights over itself: the rights of persons
to and over themselves. It relates, in a word, to the autonomy of auton-
omy, considered and valued not, in this case, as a necessary means,
subjugated to the imperatives of competition and profit, but as the
cardinal value on which all others rest and against which they are
measured. The issue, in a nutshell, is the development of people's
autonomy irrespective of companies' need for it. What is at stake is the
possibility of withdrawing from the power of capital, of the market,
of the economic sphere, the fields of activity which are opening up
in the time freed from work.
We find an exemplary illustration of this issue in two schemes for
'pluri-activity' or 'multi-activity' which have been submitted for
public debate in France. The first of these takes the typical employ-
ers' line and sees people's- carefully circumscribed- autonomy as
a means of increasing the flexibility and productivity of their work.
The second assumes an explicitly political dimension by conceiving
'multi-activity' as a social issue: in this vision, it is to shift the centre
of gravity of everyone's lives so that, from now on, business and work
for economic ends have only a subordinate place.
1. The first of these schemes was developed in a report (the
'Boissonnat Report') of the Commissariat general du Plan on 'Work
in Twenty Years' Time'. Picking up on the idea of 'pluri-activity',
which had been discussed previously in management circles, this
report envisaged companies being able to offer their staff so-called
Moving Beyond Wage-Based Society 75
'activity contracts'. The main function of these contracts would be
to preserve the bond between workers and 'their' companies when
their companies did not need their work for a limited period. The
main aim of the 'activity contract' is to increase the 'flexibility' of
the workforce and make employment more discontinuous without
it becoming either insecure or temporary.
This is an aim which could be achieved in one of two ways. The
first of these is to have several companies pool their permanent staff
(This is what is meant by 'pluri-activity' as originally discussed by
the employers.) When one or other of the companies concerned
cannot keep all its employees busy full-time, it can lend some of
these to associated companies with a temporary labour shortage. In
short, the plan is for a number of companies to get together to
manage their staff jointly so as to ensure they are utilized most ratio-
nally, and to manage fluctuations in demand without systematic
recourse to the use of contract or temporary labour.
The Boissonnat Report extends this notion of 'pluri-activity' to
new areas. When a group of companies has no need of all its employ-
ees, it would be able to lend its temporary surplus oflabour to 'other
public or private bodies: local communities, schools, various associa-
tions' or put them on 'social utility leave (e.g. family leave)' or on
training leave. 1
Do not imagine, however, that the staff who were sent on leave
in this way would be able to choose their non-professional activities
freely, broaden their interests and skills, enrich their lives and those
of their communities. The Report's authors make clear that 'the
various forms of work, including training and freelance or voluntary
activity' must be consonant with the 'collective or particular inter-
ests of the contracting companies'. 2 Although they are on 'social
utility' leave, then, the workers must remain in the service of their
companies even in their chosen voluntary work or cultural activity.
They will remain in thrall to the logic, and the control, of their
employers, confined during the breaks in their professional lives
within the narrow horizon of productivism. 'The autonomy of the
person' is itself instrumentalized here for its 'productive usefulness' .3
In the end, the 'activity contract' extends the domination of pro-
ductivist logic and subordination to company interests to those activ-
ities outside work which might otherwise be fitted in between
periods of employment.
 76 Moving Beyond Wage-Based Society
2. The Centre des jeunes dirigeants (CJD) proposes a fundamen-
tally different approach. To the employers' notion of 'pluri-activity',
it opposes a formula which allows 'each individual to regain control
of their time'. This reappropriation, they argue, will represent the
'true wealth of the coming decades' and will be able to 'put an end
to subjection to the economic sphere ... If we wish to redistribute
to all citizens this capacity to dispose of their time-capital, they
have to be liberated from the subjection to rigid time schedules -
from the need to spend their lives earning a living'. 4
The CJD's formula, which is very close to the one I have myself
proposed, allows for both an overall and an individualized reduction
of working time (the former over a year or several years, the latter
over a week or month, with each worker being able to choose and
adjust his/her working hours) within a framework of 'permanent
negotiation'. The company maintains 'security of income and status
for employees' or, in other words, assures them of the right to a con-
tinuous income for discontinuous working, which may be organized
on a basis they themselves select. The right to 'choose one's working
hours' will necessarily lead to a new approach to work, 'which will
set each of us on the way to other modes of participation in collec-
tive life, in society'. 5 'The company will have to lose the excessive
importance waged work has given it in people's lives ... A complete
overhaul of the organization of work, both within companies and in
society generally' will be needed to provide the impetus for a whole
set of changes. 6 The work-based society will have to give way to a
society based on 'multi-activity'. 'The response to unemployment,
and the exclusion and need for resocialization it produces, necessar-
ily involve a rise in multi-activity and a diversification of social alle-
giances.' Hence the need to diversify sources of income: 'Business
owes it to society right now to break the hold of employment by
allowing people to enter gradually, at their own pace, into the logic
of multi-activity ... Conversely, it is up to society ... to create the
appropriate legal and political framework'. 7
The starting point in this instance is an expressly political con-
sideration. 'Multi-activity' and reducing the 'excessive importance'
work and the company have assumed are presented as a common
aspiration which is to find collective expression and political realization
through social change. That change is necessary for the survival (or
reconstitution) of a society in which both persons and companies
can flourish by making the best of the innovative character of the
Moving Beyond Wage-Based Society 77
productive forces. That society must be so constituted that, far from
bringing about social disintegration, flexible, discontinuous and evo-
lutional forms of working give rise to new forms of sociality and
cohesion.
Whatever its limitations in other respects, the CJD distances itself
here from the dominant thinking by clearly bringing out that the fun-
damentally different society 'the twenty-first-century company' needs will
come about only if it imposes itself independently of the companies' need
for such a society. That 'multi-activity and agreed time' -based society
must impose itself through its intrinsic desirability. It must impose
itself by virtue of the aspirations by which the autonomous and 'rich
individualities', which the companies need, transcend their productive
function and become irreducible to that function.
We have, in short, to rethink society on the lines of the aspirations
which arise from the increased autonomy of persons, instead of con-
ceiving it in terms of capital's need to shackle and control that auton-
omy. There is one important consequence of this approach to the
political task: the social conditions through which, as we have seen,
the post-Fordist enterprise 'subjects' the workers whom it no longer
has power to command will have to disappear and, with them, the
hold they gave capital over labour. The CJD's thinking on this aspect
echoes the 'general intellect' theory:
The source of value today lies in intelligence and imagination. Value
is embodied in immaterial things. Human knowledge counts for more
than machine time. Man, as bearer of his own knowledge capital, is
bearer of part of the company's capital.
This transformation of value will have important consequences in
the future. The ownership of capital will become more and more dis-
tinct from that of the company. The company will have to be given
a personality distinct from that of the formal joint-stock company.
Insofar as [everyone] will possess an increasing share of the know-
ledge, and hence of the value of the company, it will be necessary to
negotiate the daily organization and operation jointly- together with
the most strategic decisions. Who will be able in the future to see
themselves as owners of the company? 8
Let us make no mistake about this: wage-labour has to disappear
and, with it, capitalism.
When its implications and consequences are fully thought
through, the multi-activity-based society is not a modified version
78 Moving Beyond Wage-Based Society
of the 'work-based society'. It marks a breakthrough to a quite dif-
ferent form. If such a society is to be established and multi-activity
to develop, more will be needed than society creating 'the legal and
political framework for it'; or 'companies [having] broken the hold
of employment'. For multi-activity to develop, society will have to
organize itself to achieve it through a range of specific policies. Social
time and space will have to be organized to indicate the general
expectation that everybody will engage in a range of different activ-
ities and modes of membership of the society. To indicate that the
norm is for everyone to belong - or at least to be able to belong -
to a self-providing co-operative, a service exchange network, a
scientific research and experiment group, an orchestra or a choir, a
drama, dance or painting workshop, a sports club, a yoga or judo
group, etc.; and that the aim within the sports or arts 'societies' is
not to select, eliminate or rank individuals, but to encourage each
member to refresh and surpass him/herself ever anew in competitive co-
operation with the others, this pursuit of excellence by each being a goal
common to all. This is how the 'culture-based' society (for which the
Western prototype was Athenian society) is distinguished from the
work-based society.
EXIT ROUTES
I shall now try to outline that 'set of specific policies' which, break-
ing with the work-based society, could open this up into a society
based on multi-activity and culture. This is an experimental,
exploratory attempt, pursuing goals similar to those embodied in the
'revolutionary reforms' which some of us proposed in the early
1960s:
1 First of all, we have to free up people's minds and imagina-
tions, to cast off those unquestioned assumptions which the
dominant social discourse latches on to. We have to think
through those exemplary experiences which explore other
forms of productive co-operation, exchange, solidarity and
living.
2 We have to adopt the point of view of the radically different
society and economy, which are visible on the horizon of the
current changes and represent the ultimate potential destiny of
the society that is currently disintegrating. This will force us, on
Moving Beyond Wage-Based Society 79
the one hand, to get a better grasp of the meaning of those
changes and the outlines of what is struggling to be born. It will
compel us, on the other, to understand that we are living not
through a 'crisis' which could be resolved by the restoration of
previous conditions, but though a transformation in which
capitalism is itself destroying the foundations of its existence
and producing the conditions for its own transcendence. But
we still have to know how to seize upon those conditions and
think through the transition by starting out from its ultimate
conceivable term. It is only in the light of that ultimate state
that we can judge what we do - or fail to do.
3 Lastly, we have to 'widen as far as possible the gap between
society and capitalism', 9 that is to say, to increase as far as pos-
sible the spaces and resources which enable alternative social-
ities to be produced, which allow modes of life, co-operation
and activities to emerge that lie outside the power apparatuses
of capital and the state. In other words, we have to maximize
the number of paths 'out of capitalism', this expression being
understood in the sense of a biblical Exodus which invents its
own 'promised lands' as it goes along.
The institutional actors who can decide to implement these poli-
cies will not be the actors in the alternative society which is strug-
gling to come into existence. All we can ask of politics is to create
the spaces in which the alternative social practices can develop. It is
from this perspective that a politics which allows for, and encour-
ages, multi-activity must be assessed, multi-activity being both the
engine of the exodus and its final goal, in so far as this diminishes
the importance of the wage relation, and opposes 'work' by substi-
tuting different modes of co-operation for it. As we shall see below
in relation to a policy aim of 'changing the city', the change of men-
talities is hastened by that of the social environment which in its
turn gains momentum from the change of mentalities. System theo-
rists call these effects, which generate the cause that generates them,
a 'feedback loop'.
Fausto Bertinotti provided quite a good formulation of all this,
without exaggerating the role a political party can play in:
the revolutionary alternative which ... represents potentially a long
process of social transformation, combining a break with the past, new
organizations of subjectivity, the construction of concrete experiences
80 Moving Beyond Wage-Based Society
and 'exemplary' institutional levels, and the ability to develop new
theories ... Proposals for a different economic and social policy ...
must bring into play both the elements of a possible 'What is to be
Done?' and the outline of a 'different society', a 'different develop-
ment', and 'other types of interpersonal relations', bringing together
in a common perspective aspirations and levels of experience which
will otherwise be expressed only in separate fragments incapable of
communicating with each other. 10
These aspirations and experiences involve new social relations lying
beyond the logic of the market, money and the sexual division of
labour; new areas of time outside the sphere of wage-labour; new
production techniques and new relations to the environment
respecting natural balances and other life forms, etc. And, at the
heart of all this, the individual and collective reappropriation of time
and its organization.
It is important to show that the possibility of transcending capital-
ist society is inherent in the evolution of capitalist society itself You have
to demonstrate that something is possible for it to become so. It is
in this spirit that I shall now outline that 'set of policies' I alluded
to above. Each of these is desirable in itself, but assumes its true
meaning only when combined with, and supported by, the others.
Each already exists in embryonic form. None has such a large initial
cost that it cannot be applied with sufficient vigour to set its own
dynamic running. But each taken in isolation can be exploited by the
dominant powers in a way which will discredit it. I shall outline a
set of policies aimed at:
1 guaranteeing a sufficient income for all;
2 combining the redistribution of work with the individual and
collective control over time;
3 encouraging new socialities to blossom, and new modes of co-
operation and exchange, through which social bonds and social
cohesion will be created beyond the wage-relation.
Guaranteed income
Security of income is the first precondition for a society based on
multi-activity. Unconditionally guaranteeing everyone an income for
life will, however, have a fundamentally different meaning and func-
Moving Beyond Wage-Based Society 81
tion depending on whether that income is (1) insufficient or (2)
sufficient for protecting him/her from poverty.
(1) The guarantee of a basic income at less than subsistence level
which its advocates hope to see substituted for most forms of incom~
redistribution (family allowance, housing, unemployment and sick-
ness benefits, basic state pension, etc.), functions to force the unem-
ployed to accept dirty, low-status jobs on the cheap. This is the
position of the 'Friedmannite' neo-liberals of the Chicago School,
and also of German liberals like Mitschke and of the British conser-
vatives. In their view, unemployment is explained by the fact that
many potential jobs with low skill levels and low productivity are
unprofitable at normal rates of pay. These jobs have, consequently,
to be subsidized by allowing the worker to combine an insufficient
basic social income with an equally insufficient income from work.
In this way, a kind of 'secondary labour market' is created, protected
from competition from low-wage countries but 'protected' also from
the provisions of labour legislation, which is destined to disappear.
The lower the basic income, the greater will be the 'encouragement'
to take any work at all, and the more new 'slavers' will be able to
specialize in employing a cheap workforce in fly-by-night operations
providing service work on a contract and subcontract basis.
American workfare, which received President Clinton's impri-
matur in late July 1996, links the right to a very small welfare
allowance with the obligation to perform unpaid- or very low-paid
- work of 'social utility' for a municipal authority or approved asso-
ciation. Workfare has many advocates in France and Britain - and
in Germany, where municipal authorities have begun to threaten
the long-term unemployed with the withdrawal of their benefits
if they do not perform work of 'public utility' (cleaning, earth-
moving, clearance work, etc.), for which they are paid an hourly rate
of 2 DM, which is intended to cover their travel and clothing
expenses.
All forms of workfare stigmatize the unemployed as incompetents
and scroungers, whom society is entitled to force to work - for their
own good. In this way, it reassures itself as to the cause of unem-
ployment: that cause is the unemployed themselves. They do not
have, it is said, the social skills and requisite will-power to get a job,
and they will consequently be put to the most menial tasks. In reality,
the high rate of unemployment among the unskilled is due not to
82 Moving Beyond Wage-Based Society
their lack of professional skills, but to the fact that (both in France
and in Germany) one-third of skilled or highly skilled people are
in unskilled occupations (for want of being able to find anything
better) and have thus elbowed out those who ought normally to be
able to fill those jobs. Instead of subsidizing unskilled jobs by way of
a basic income, it is the redistribution of skilled jobs that ought to
be subsidized by considerably lowering the hours of work in those
occupations.
The ultra-conservative conception of workfare does, however, co-
exist with a post-Fordist conception, defended by Yoland Bresson
among others. Bresson advocates a universal, unconditional 'subsis-
tence income' [revenu d'existence] of 1,800 French francs (c.£180)
per month which would perform the function both of a total or
partial unemployment benefit and of an incentive to accept casual
part-time jobs with variable wages and hours. 'The future is one of
discontinuous employment, and we have to give everyone the means
to fit themselves into the new system ... In this context, the sub-
sistence income is a means, not an end in itself' 11
According to this conception, the 'subsistence income' is to enable
employment to become intermittent, and may even encourage such
intermittent employment. But who is to benefit from it? That is the
question. A very low 'subsistence income' is in fact a subsidy for
employers. It allows them to find labour while paying less than
subsistence-level wages. But while it is enabling for the employers,
it is an imposition upon the workers. Since they are not guaranteed
a sufficient basic income, they have to look continually for some kind ·
of casual work or temporary job and are, therefore, incapable of
living their lives on a multi-activity basis. In this case, the 'subsis-
tence income' gives a sizeable boost to deregulating the wage rela-
tion, to making employment more insecure and 'flexible', and to
replacing it with a commercial contract. We see here the traps inher-
ent in demanding continuous income for discontinuous work.
Unless, of course, the breaks in work, its discontinuity, reflect not
capital's discretionary power over labour; but the individual and collec-
tive right of those performing work to control how they manage their own
time. We shall return to this below.
(2) Granting each citizen a sufficient social income follows an oppo-
site logic: the aim is not to force the recipients to accept any kind
Moving Beyond Wage-Based Society 83
of work on any terms whatsoever, but to free them from the con-
straints of the labour market. The basic social income must enable
them to refuse work and reject 'inhuman' working conditions.
And it must be part of a social environment which enables all citizens
to decide on an ongoing basis between the use-value of their time and
its exchange-value: that is to say between the 'utilities' they can
acquire by selling their working time and those they can 'self-
provide' by using that time themselves.
Such a universal grant of a sufficient income (I shall return to this
at greater length below) must not be understood as a form of assis-
tance, nor even of social protection, leaving individuals dependent
upon the welfare state. It must be understood, rather, as a prime
example of what Anthony Giddens calls a 'generative policy' .12 That
is to say, it must give individuals and groups increased resources for
taking charge of their own lives, further power over their way of life
and living conditions. The aim is not to enable people not to work
at all, but rather to give genuine effect to the right to work: not the
right to that work you are 'employed' to do, but to the concrete work
you do without having to be paid for it, without its profitability or
exchange-value coming into the equation.
The granting of a sufficient basic income to all citizens must,
therefore, be inseparable from developing and making accessible the
resources which enable and encourage self-activity to take place, the
resources with which individuals and groups can satisfy by their own
unshackled efforts part of the needs and desires they have them-
selves defined. This is why discussions of the precise amount of a
sufficient income have no great meaning in themselves: they distract
from the essence of the question which the current social changes
really raise by situating those changes within the framework of wage-
' based society and seeking to finance the universal grant by fiscal
redistribution. Now, the prospect which lies before us and which
should be the backdrop to our thinking is a future with less employ-
ment and less selling of labour and services, but with a growth in
collective facilities and services, in non-monetary exchange and self-
providing. According to Frithjof Bergmann, high-tech self-providing
could easily cover 70 per cent of needs and desires on two days' work
a week.
The schemes which are currently being debated could move us
closer to that ultimate goal or further from it; they could open up
this potential future or close it off; they could show up the need for
 84 Moving Beyond Wage-Based Society
a break with the present system or by-pass that need. It is on this
basis that they have to be judged.
It was, indeed, in this spirit that the universal grant of a sufficient
social income was advocated by libertarian communists and social-
ists, whose aim was not to redistribute or 'share' employment, but
to abolish wage-labour and the compulsion to work, to sweep away
capitalist business and the state. These included Bellamy and Popper-
Lynkeus at the dawn of the twentieth century, the French 'distrib-
utists' who followed Jacques Duboin's theories; the Proudhonite
'Ordre Nouveau' intellectual movement of Robert Aron, Arnaud
Dandieu and Alexandre Marc in the 1930s; Paul Goodman in the
USA in the 1950s; and at least some of the German 'Greens' whoI
in the 1980s, rediscovered this tradition and adapted some of its
ideas to present conditions.
For many years I rejected the idea of a social income which would
allow people to 'live without working'. This I did for reasons quite
contrary to the disciples of Rawls, who see 'work' as 'a good' which
must, in the name of justice, be distributed equitably. But 'work' is
not 'a good'. It is a necessary activity, carried out in the modern
period according to norms defined by society, at the demand of
society, imparting a sense that one is capable of doing what society
needs. It gives recognition, socializes and confers rights because it is
itself required as an obligation. In this way, 'work' draws people out
of their private solitude; it is an aspect of citizenship. And it repre-
sents, more fundamentally (as work one does) - beyond its particu-
lar social determination a mastery of self and of the surrounding
world which is necessary for the development of human capacities.
As the need for work diminishes, fairness requires that it should
also diminish in everyone's life and that the burden of work should
be equitably distributed. This is why, in previous works, I wanted the
guarantee of a full income for all to be linked to all citizens per-
forming the quantity of work required for the production of the
wealth to which their income entitled them. This could take the
form, for example, of 20,000 hours which individuals could spread
over their working lives in as many 'tranches' as they wished, on con-
dition that the gap between two working periods did not exceed a
certain interval.
This formula, which I advocated from 1983 onwards, was consis-
tent with the prospect of wage-labour and the 'law of value' disap-
Moving Beyond Wage-Based Society 85
pearing: the guaranteed social income was no longer a wage. 13 It was
consistent with taking back, and gaining control of, time. But it was
not consistent with the perspectives opened up, and the changes
brought about, by post-Fordism. I am therefore abandoning it for the
following four reasons.
In defence of unconditionality
(l) When intelligence and imagination ('general intellect') become
the main productive force, working time ceases to be the measure
oflabour; indeed, it ceases to be measurable. The use-value produced
may bear no relation to the time taken to produce it. It may vary
greatly from person to person, or depending on the material or
immaterial nature of the work. Lastly, stable employment paid
according to the number of working hours per week is in rapid
decline. It is becoming increasingly difficult to define an irreducible
quantity of work to be performed by each person over a determi-
nate period. It is impossible to measure the working hours of the
self-employed or of craftworkers or the providers of intangible ser-
vices. Only the granting of a basic social income can encourage these
people - in most cases it is the only thing that can allow them - to
reduce their professional activity in order to lead a multi-active life.
Only the payment of a basic income will absolve them of the need
to fight, in a crowded labour market, for the few crumbs from the
ever smaller sums employers distribute to pay for labour. The uni-
versal, unconditional grant of a basic income is, therefore (in a context
which I shall specify in detail below), the best instrument for redis-
tributing both paid work and unpaid activities as widely as possible.
(2) The unconditional right to a sufficient basic income will doubt-
less bring some immediate objections. How can we avoid a growing
mass of scroungers living off the work of others? Won't those others
refuse to carry the burden and demand the prohibition of such
idling? Won't they call for work to be made compulsory in the form
of workfare or obligatory community service?
Many advocates of a universal grant, both liberal and socialist,
make these objections. But they then run up against the following
difficulty: what is to be the content of the compulsory work to be
demanded in return for the basic living allowance? How is that work
to be defined, measured and distributed when the importance of
86 Moving Beyond Wage-Based Society
work in the economy is declining? And how are they to avoid com-
pulsory work competing with, and even destroying, an increasing
proportion of normally paid public activities and jobs?
Claus Offe and Jeremy Rifkin respond, with others, by situating
this compulsory work in the third sector of activities which meet
needs that cannot be paid for, or profitably carried on, within the
market economy. It is to be 'voluntary care work or educational
activities, community work with approved associations'. In this way1
the universal allowance would serve to create 'a post-industrial
domestic sector' .14 It would become the payment for voluntary work
performed for recognized non-profit-making bodies. It would make
'voluntary' work compulsory.
Diane Elson makes a similar proposal: 'Alongside the right to a
grant should be the duty, on the part of able-bodied adults, of under-
taking some unpaid household work of caring and providing for
those who are unable to take care of themselves. Persons already
undertaking care of a young or old or sick or handicapped person
would be exempt.' 15
So, in the one case (Offe), the concern to have a quid pro quo in
terms of work which does not compete with normal employment
produces the nonsensical prospect of compulsory voluntary work.
The perverse effects of this provision are clear for all to see: real vol-
unteers would have alongside them 'pressed' volunteers, and there
is every likelihood these latter would be treated as second-class
workers and given the least rewarding work1 since they would be
doing the same things as the real volunteers were doing from con-
viction and for free, but would appear to be doing it (or would be
suspected of doing it) simply in order to draw their allowance. Com-
pulsory voluntary work then becomes a trap: it devalues the work
of the volunteers who are pressed into doing it.
In the other case (Elson), the obligation on the recipients of a basic
income to perform domestic work (intentionally) blurs the distinc-
tion between productive and reproductive labour. The latter is
equated with the former and regarded as interchangeable with it. In
this way, the private character of domestic activities is denied.
Parents' obligations to their children, adults' obligations to their
elderly parents would all be set up as social obligations and placed
under public control. Spontaneous behaviour between persons -
where spontaneity is, in fact 1 crucial to the emotional value - would
be administratively monitored and standardized. 16
Moving Beyond Wage-Based Society 87
In each case, the grant of a basic income is conceived as a payment
for family activities which are thus irresistibly drawn into the field
of those activities whereby one is called on to 'earn one's living'.
Entitlement to the basic income requires either having children of
one's own1 or looking after other people's children and households,
or working in the 'voluntary' sector. Activities whose normal
meaning lies in an absence of self-interest become a means for
acquiring an income. There is then no reason why the list of activi-
ties 'which may be regarded as work' should not extend to the artis-
tic, cultural1 religious or sporting fields. 17 If these kinds of activity
themselves became a means to qualify for the basic income, they
would in their turn be drawn within the ambit of instrumental
reason and administrative standardization.
It is important that we grasp precisely what is at issue here. If we
want the universal grant of a basic income to be linked to the per-
formance of equivalent work as its justification, two conditions have
to be met. First, that work has to be work within the public sphere
which is of benefit to everyone1 and, second, that work must be able
to have payment (in this case, of the basic income) as its aim, without
the fact of payment corrupting its meaning. If it is not possible to meet
this latter condition, and if the universal grant is intended to promote
voluntary, artistic, cultural, family and mutual-aid activities, then the
universal grant has to be guaranteed to everyone unconditionally. For
only if it is unconditional will it be possible to protect the uncondi-
tional nature of those activities which are only fully meaningful
when done for their own sake. After arguing against it for many years,
I have therefore come round to the position of those who advocate
a sufficient (not a minimal) basic income which is 'strictly uncondi-
tional', as Alain Caille and Ahmet Insel put it. 18 I see this as the only
way to preserve the voluntary sector and to protect from socializa-
tion and economicization while at the same time making them
accessible to all - those activities 'which derive their value from
being done for their own sake'.
(3) The universal grant of a basic income is the most appropriate
arrangement for a situation in which the 'general state of science' is
coming to be the main force of production 19 and in which direct
working time is becoming negligible by comparison with the time
required for the production, reproduction and extended reproduc-
tion of the capacities and skills of the workforce in the so-called
88 Moving Beyond Wage-Based Society
'immaterial economy'. It would be interesting to calculate the
number of weeks or years spent on basic and continuing training, in
the training of trainers, etc. for each hour, week or year of direct work
performed in the economy. And training itself is a small matter by
comparison with all that it takes to provide for the development of
the capacities of imagination, interpretation, analysis, synthesis and
communication integral to the post-Fordist workforce. In the 'imma-
terial' economy, 'the worker is both the labour power and the one
who directs that labour power'. It can no longer be detached from
his/her person:
Worker, work and labour power tend to merge in self-producing
persons. And that production takes place not just in the workplace,
but in schools, cafes, stadiums, neighbourhoods and discussion groups,
on trips, at theatres and concerts, through newspapers and books etc.
In short, it takes place wherever individuals come together and
produce the world of social relations. 20
In progressive firms, continuing training is already part of work
(and working hours) and is paid for as such. But this extension of
the employment contract to include training is not without its dis-
advantages, since it subordinates the right to training, and the nature
of that training, to company interests. It develops a merely func-
tional, limited autonomy in individuals, of a kind which can be con-
trolled and subjected. By contrast, it is one of the functions of an
unconditional basic income to make the right to develop one's
capacities an unconditional right to an autonomy which transcends
its productive function; an autonomy experienced and valued for
its own sake on a variety of planes: moral (autonomy of value-
judgement), political (autonomy of decision-making regarding the
common good), cultural (invention of life-styles, consumption
models and arts of living) and existential (the capacity to take care
of oneself, rather than leave the experts and authorities to decide
what is good for us).
Beyond the 'labour theory of value'
(4) There is a further argument in favour of an unconditional social
income. It is the arrangement best suited to the economy that is
beginning to emerge on the other side of the impasse into which
Moving Beyond Wage-Based Society 89
current trends are leading. An increasing volume of wealth is pro-
duced with a decreasing volume of capital and labour. As a result,
production distributes a decreasing amount of pay and wages to a
decreasing number of workers. The purchasing power of a growing
proportion of the population is falling. Unemployment, poverty and
absolute destitution are spreading. The rapidly growing productivity
of labour and capital produces a surplus of labour power and capital.
And the latter now attempts to expand either without passing
through the mediation of productive work at all (simply by trans-
actions on the financial or currency markets) or by investing in
low-wage countries. The contraction in the volume of wages - and
also the tax breaks which states accord capital to prevent its flight -lead
to a situation in which those activities and investments which do
not bring short-term returns (research, education, public services
and amenities, environmental protection, etc.) can no longer be
financed. 21 As the privatization of public services continues and
social expenditure and benefits keep on falling, the question usually
directed at the advocates of a basic social income comes to encap-
sulate the problem of the system as a whole: 'where are you going
to get the money from?' Although working time is no longer the
measure of created wealth, it still remains the basis for the distrib-
ution of incomes and, for the most part, for the sums expended and
redistributed by the state. The trend within the economy is thus for the
amounts that are to be levied and redistributed to cover individual and
collective needs ultimately to exceed the amounts distributed by and for
production. It is not merely the universal grant of a basic income
which cannot be funded on this basis. It is the whole of the state
and the society which are coming apart at the seams (something
which is very visible in Great Britain and the USA). Wassily
Leontief summed up the situation in the following metaphor: 'What
would happen if we suddenly found ourselves in [Paradise]? With
all goods and services provided without work, no one would be gain-
fully employed. Being unemployed means receiving no wages. As a
result, until appropriate new income policies were formulated to
fit the changed technological conditions everyone would starve in
Paradise. 122
Leontief didn't say precisely what new income policy he had in
mind, but Jacques Duboin indicated the 'exit' as early as 1931 and
Marx did so in 185 7 (in the Grundrisse, which Duboin could not
90 Moving Beyond Wage-Based Society
have known) :23 the distribution of means of payment must correspond
to the volume of wealth socially produced and not to the volume of work
performed.
As Rene Passet so succinctly puts it, 'What we regard today as sec-
ondary distribution will become primary distribution.' Because it is
the product of integrated, 'man-machine-organization' systems
in which 'the contribution specific to each person is no longer
measurable', 'the national product becomes genuinely collective
property ... The question of distribution is no longer one of com-
mutative, but distributive justice.' 24
distribution of means of payment will no longer take the form
of a wage, but of what, even in his day, Duboin called a 'social
income'. This no longer reflects the 'value' of the labour done (that
is to say, of the products necessary to reproduce the labour power
expended), but the needs, desires and aspirations society chooses to
meet. It requires the creation of another sort of money, which cannot
be hoarded and which Passet, following Duboin, calls 'consumption
money'. 25
This is where present developments are heading. They are ren-
dering the 'law of value' obsolete. They require, in fact, a quite dif-
ferent economy in which prices are no longer a reflection of the cost
of direct labour contained in the products and the means of labour,
a cost which is becoming increasingly marginal, and the price system
no longer reflects the exchange-value of products. Prices will neces-
sarily be political prices and the price system will reflect society's
choice of a model of consumption and civilization, its choice of a
way of life. 26
When fully thought through, the universal grant of a basic income
can be seen as equivalent to a pooling of socially produced wealth.
It is a pooling, not a 'sharing out' (the sharing out comes afterwards:
you can only share out between everyone what belongs to everyone,
what is, at the outset, no one's). Rene Passet expresses this clearly
when he writes of the national product as 'genuinely collective prop-
erty' produced by collective labour in which it is impossible to assess
each person's contribution. As a consequence, the 'from each accord-
ing to his labour' becomes obsolete. The 'collective worker' is
tending to be supplanted by a fundamentally different virtual subject
as the direct work of shaping matter is replaced as the main
productive force by the 'general state of science ... or the applica-
tion of this science to production', that is to say, by the capacity
Moving Beyond Wage-Based Society 91
of 'social individuals' to make use of techno-science through their
own self-organized co-operation and exchange. It is then 'the free
development of individualities' (I am continuing to paraphrase
the Grundrisse here) by 'the reduction of necessary labour to a
minimum', and the production of use-values according to needs,
which become the objectives.
The call for a sufficient, universal, unconditional basic income fits
in to such a vision. It cannot be achieved immediately, but we must
begin to conceptualize it and prepare the way for it as of now. It has
heuristic value: it reflects the most basic and advanced meaning of
present developments. Conversely, it shows up the nonsensical nature
of a system which makes unprecedented savings of working time,
but turns that time into a disaster for those who save it, because the
system can neither share it out, nor share out the produced or pro-
ducible wealth, nor recognize the intrinsic value of 'leisure and time
for higher activities' (Marx). It reveals the way this disposable time
is individually and collectively appropriated as a major issue. And it
shows the capacity for autonomy - the individual and social ability
to make meaningful use of one's disposable time and enjoy it- as a
cardinal virtue. It points forward to that other society which can be
seen emerging out of present trends.
It is no mere intellectual pastime or self-indulgence to clarify the
perspective to which these trends point. It is on such clarification
that the capacity to give the most advanced meaning to the changes
which are taking place depends. And the capacity also to develop
actions, arenas of conflict, and practices which keep that meaning
responsive to the latest developments by seeking to take control of
those changes. The ultimate goal to which the unconditional grant of
a basic income points is that of a society in which the necessity of work
is no longer experienced as such because each person, from childhood
onwards, will be involved in, and feel the attraction of, a general pro-
liferation of artistic, sporting, techno-scientific, artisanal, political,
philosophical, ecosophic, 27 relational and co-operative activities all
around him/her; a society in which means of production and facilities
for self-providing are accessible to everyone at any time of day, just as
databanks and teleworking resources already are; in which exchanges
are principally exchanges of knowledge, not of commodities, and do
not therefore need to be mediated by money; in which the immateri-
ality of the main form of productive work corresponds to the imma-
teriality of the main form of fixed capital. Once it has been eliminated
 92 Moving Beyond Wage-Based
as a separate, autonomized power, productive work will consist mainly
in the capacity to take advantage of the accumulated knowledge, to
enrich and exchange it, without the valorization of that knowledge
imposing itselfon individuals as an alien demand, without it dictating to
them the nature, intensity, duration and hours of their work.
It is in this sense that we must understand Marx's remark that
'free time, i.e. time for the full development of the individual ...
from the standpoint of the direct production process ... can be
regarded as the production of fixed capital, this fixed capital being
man himsel£' 28 In other words, free time enables individuals to
develop capacities (of invention, creation, conception and intellec-
tion) which give them a virtually unlimited productivity, and this
development of their productive capacity, which can be equated
with the production of a fixed capital, is not work, though it
produces the same outcome as work 'from the standpoint of the
direct production process'. It is not work, because it was made
possible by 'the general reduction of the necessary labour of a
society to a minimum'. 29 It is this 'time freed up for their own
development' which makes it possible for them to take as their goal
'the free development of individualities', their 'artistic, scientific etc.
development'. 30 And it is this free development of individualities
which reappears in production as the capacity to create an unlim-
ited variety of wealth with a very small expenditure of time and
energy.
In other words, the increase in the productive capacities of indi-
viduals is the consequence, not the goal of their full development. The
goal is not to maximize production for production's sake or power
for power's sake -this is the difference between 'man' and 'fixed
capital' -but to save on the working time and expenditure of energy
necessary for achieving a fulfilled life.
'Truly wealthy a nation, when the working day is 6 rather than 12
hours,' wrote an anonymous Ricardian, whom Marx quotes repeat-
edly, in 1821. 31 It is impossible to state more clearly that the full
development of the productive forces makes the full employment of the
productive forces (in particular, labour power) unnecessary and makes
it possible for production to become an activity of secondary impor-
tance. The 'massive' productivity which techno-science bestows on
human labour means that the maximization of free time, not the maxi-
mization of production, becomes the immanent destination and purpose
of economic reason. 'Real economy - saving - consists of the saving
Moving Beyond Wage-Based Society 93
of labour time. 132 'Real economy' leads to the elimination of work as
the dominant form of activity. It is this elimination of work and its
replacement by personal activity which we must now make our
political goal; it is a goal we can make tangible by achieving changes
which are practically attainable as of now.
Redistribution of work, liberation of free time
Companies have been reducing working time and are continuing to
do so, month on month. The employers have turned the reduction
of working hours into a management tool. Indeed, it has become a
method through which companies are coming to have complete
control of time, total power over the lives of their workers. The most
radical form of this power is the 'zero-hours contract', introduced
into Britain by Japanese car firms, and known in Germany as 'Arbeit
auf Abruf'. In this system, the 'employees' are not employed, but are
required to be permanently 'on call'. They will then be employed
when the company needs them, being paid at the agreed hourly rate
for only the few hours or days they work. This marks a return, more
or less, to the day-labourers of Dickensian times (though the same
scheme currently operates in the docks and in the central markets
of some cities), who turned up at the appointed hiring places at
dawn in the hope an employer would deign to take them on for a
few hours.
The redistribution of work has been effected by dispossessing the
workers of any power over their own time: those the firm needs on
a permanent basis are employed on flexible terms, depending on the
economic situation or the time of year; the others - the temporary,
contract, part-time or tele-workers - work intermittently and dis-
continuously, or not at all. The total annual quantity of work, though
it is diminishing, is being spread over an increasing number of
workers (statistically, job numbers are rising), in such a way that
everyone feels insecure. The employed are fearful of losing their jobs
(more than a third of the workforce have already known periods of
unemployment in recent years: one out of six has given up looking
for a job and no longer figures in the statistics). For around half the
workforce (and these people will soon be in the majority), the
notions of normal working hours and reduced working time no
longer mean anything.
 94 Moving Beyond Wage-Based Society
We have to ask what the significance of the 32- or 35-hour week
might be, just exactly what it can do for a number of categories of
workers, even when converted to an annual basis and with a second
cheque added to compensate for the loss of earnings. I am thinking,
here, of the person slaving at one McJob after another; 'temping' (in
France, half of such assignments are for less than a week; those of
four weeks or longer represent only 5. 7 per cent of the total); or
working half-time for half wages or working spasmodically on a free-
lance basis for 75 hours one week in every four or five.
Admittedly, by greatly reducing the weekly (or monthly, or
annual) working hours for those in permanent jobs, stable employ-
ment can be distributed between more people. The example of
Volkswagen has shown this. By reducing the working week from 36
to 28.8 hours, VW initially avoided having to lay off 30,000 workers.
However, since this policy was not carried forward, the limits were
soon reached. It did not prevent periods of temporary factory close-
down, continual shrinkage of the workforce, the introduction of -
paid and unpaid - additional holiday periods or new forms of very
short hours and discontinuous working. 33
In short, it showed that a policy of reduction of working time can
be effective only if it is an evolving measure, transcending the mere
company level. It must take account of the volume of waged work
available and the proportion of stable, permanent jobs. If the aim is
at the same time to distribute a decreasing quantity of work to an
expanding workforce, to increase the proportion of stable, perma-
nent jobs and to offer increased possibilities of workers choosing
their own hours, there is only one way open. Work must be made
more discontinuous; the workforce must be given a choice between
a very wide range of forms of discontinuity, with the result that dis-
continuity of working can be transformed into a new freedom - into
the right to work intermittently and to lead a multi-active life in which
professional work and unpaid activities supplement and complement
each other.
This is what was proposed in France by a medium-sized civil engi-
neering company (Rabot Dutilleul). In the summer of 1996, they
introduced the 'one-in-five' system. This allowed members of staff
to reduce their working hours by one day, one week or one month
in every five. This right to discontinuous working, which is a
company policy at Rabot Dutilleul, is a social policy in the Nether-
lands and Denmark, a blueprint for society. All imaginable forms of
Moving Beyond Wage-Based Society 95
reduced working arrangements are to be found in the Netherlands,
where there is the highest percentage of part-time workers in the
world (37 per cent). The main Dutch trade union (FNV) has pub-
lished a ten-point guide entitled 'Choose your working hours
for yourself' From the two-, three- or four-day week to the four-,
six- or nine-month year, all possible combinations and options are
available.
The Danes brought in a law in 1993 which takes them even
further down this same path. They variously employ systems of 'one
in four', 'one in seven' (sabbatical year) or 'one in ten', with a cor-
responding increase in the numbers of permanent staff. This law is
in fact a highly flexible variant of the scheme Michel Albert pro-
posed in his 1982 book, Le Pari fran9ais. 34 It allows any employee to
take a year's leave, which may be broken up and divided out in any
way he/she wishes over a period of his/her choice. During the period
of leave, unemployed persons will take the place of the employees
on voluntary leave, who, for their part, will receive 70 per cent of
the unemployment benefit they would get if they were to lose their
jobs. That benefit usually amounts to 90 per cent of final salary for
up to five years.
Though this right was initially conceived as an individual one,
the trade unions have managed to use it imaginatively to reduce the
working hours of entire company workforces and to increase the
number of permanent jobs. In one case, public transport workers
decided to increase their staffing level by 10 per cent by organizing
in such a way that one-tenth of them were always on leave. The
Aarhus refuse collectors organized themselves to increase their
workforce by 25 per cent. They increased the teams on each refuse
lorry to a nominal figure of four, but each employee only works three
weeks out of four. This involves a 9 per cent loss of earnings for a
25 per cent reduction in working hours.
These various schemes show that discontinuity of work does not
necessarily mean greater employment insecurity. Indeed, the more
discontinuous the work, the greater the security of employment can
be, as discontinuous working is in the end merely a reduction in
monthly, annual or pluri-annual working hours, with the work being
spread out over a greater number of people. The right to a sabbati-
cal year every five, seven or ten years; the right to training leave every
year or every few years; the right to a year of parental leave, which
the two parents can share, divide up as they wish and spread over
96 Moving Beyond Wage-Based
three years following the birth of a child (the Swedish scheme); the
right to take leave to care for a sick child or relative; the right, which
exists only in embryonic form (for trade-union officials and repre-
sentatives, for example), to take leave for activities of general utility
- all this leads to making professional activity increasingly intermit-
tent and has, in the end, the same effect as work sharing. The same
task or function is shared by several persons who hand on to each
other and all have other interests and activities in their lives.
A flexible workforce can mean something other than insecurity of
employment and recourse to temporary and contract workers, who
are hired and fired as the order book fills and empties. Flexibility can
mean increasing or decreasing the discontinuity of work, as in the
Danish system; it can mean increasing or reducing the proportion of
people who can take leave at the same time, while retaining their
status and job security.
It is, therefore, possible to rethink discontinuous working, to
rethink the flexibility of working hours and staffing as a source not
of insecurity, but of security, and as a form of the right to 'choose
one's own working hours'. This makes it possible to reduce the com-
parative importance of employment in everyone's life and to give
those who want it the chance to vary their work, change companies,
keep on the move, experience new ways of living and new activities.
All the forms of passively suffered discontinuity of employment, passively
suffered flexibility of working hours and staffing levels, should be trans-
formed into opportunities to choose and self-manage discontinuity and
flexibility.
The Danish system is currently the one offering the greatest scope
in this regard. Instead of subsidizing employment to reduce wage
costs, it subsidizes non-work and increases the workers' power in
terms of the self-organization and self-management of their mode of
co-operation. The principles of this system contain in embryo the
outlines of a different society and economy:
l It recognizes that the right to work and the right not to work
are of equal importance and are indissociably linked. The
former cannot exist without the latter. The ideology of work
is discouraged, while the idea of work sharing is promoted.
2 It recognizes everyone's right to work discontinuously, while
also recognizing the right to a continuous income. This latter
Moving Beyond Wage-Based Society 97
is not an unemployment benefit, since unemployment is not
in this case (as its legal definition stipulates) an absence of
work passively suffered by the unemployed person, but an
interruption of work which he/she has chosen, and been
encouraged to choose by a legal provision. That choice is legiti-
mated politically in so far as it chimes in with a particular
political option, a new blueprint for society. The allowance
paid to the 'voluntary unemployed' is 63 per cent of their
normal wage (not 63 per cent of the minimum wage), which
lifts the income of a half-time worker to 81.5 per cent of the
full-time rate and that of a quarter-time worker to 72.25 per
cent of full-time. The allowance is, in reality, a guaranteed
social income.
3 This system can be applied with very great flexibility in both
large and small companies. In tiny craft-based companies or in
the case of sole traders - where the working week most often
exceeds 48 hours -it will tend to take the form of job sharing
or the formation of co-operative links between several crafts-
people, pooling their jobs and orders.
In this arrangement, discontinuity of work is no longer synony-
mous with insecurity. The more intermittent work is, the easier it is
to ensure security of employment. The workforce also have greater
freedom to choose their hours and periods of work. Conversely, the
more the quantity of socially necessary labour time diminishes, the
more discontinuous, when it is distributed among everyone, will
work necessarily become.
But this is where we run up against the limitations of the Danish
system. It guarantees everyone a conditional social income during
his/her periods away from employment. It cannot, however, guaran-
tee that everyone can meet the conditions which entitle workers to
that social income, unless it were to put a constantly reducing figure
on the period of employment by which workers qualify for leave. As
the quantity of socially necessary labour diminishes, periods away
from employment will tend to become longer than periods spent in
employment, activities performed for oneself will tend to assume
greater significance than paid work, and the social income will tend
to become larger than the salary. 35 The social income will become
less and less conditional in nature and will increasingly have to
become something like an unconditional, universal grant.
 98 Moving Beyond Wage-Based Society
None the less, the 'continuous income for discontinuous working'
formula - in which the discontinuity can be managed by work col-
lectives - is particularly interesting as a 'transitional policy'. It is a
policy which is evolutionary and highly unstable, and one which pre-
empts a funding crisis that will raise the question of redefining the
basic principles and forms of the welfare state and the basic orien-
tations of the economy and society. By the high degree of self-
organization, consultation and solidarity it generates among workers,
it prepares the ground for the basic conflict that will emerge as the
welfare system enters into crisis.
Changing work
I am well aware that anyone who speaks of guaranteeing a sufficient
social income ends up hearing the following objection: 'It will greatly
weaken the incentive to work and society will end up short of
labour.' There is no good counter-argument to this objection. The
only appropriate reply is 'We have to see to it that this problem does
not arise.' We have to see to it that there is no need for 'incentives'
(which are, in fact, constraints) for people to want to work.
Dominique Meda has shown up the contradiction in the 'dominant
social discourse' very clearly. 36 It presents 'work' as a fundamental
human need, as an indispensable 'social bond', a virtue, the main
source of self-esteem and the esteem of others, but as soon as there
is mention of social rights not being linked to work, the danger of
'weakening the incentive to work' rears its head. So 'work' isn't actu-
ally so attractive, gratifying, satisfying or integrating that you don't
need to give people 'incentives' by setting benefit rates for the unem-
ployed at a level below subsistence income.
In short (I shall come back to this point at greater length in the
next chapter), to change society, we have to change 'work'- and vice
versa. To change it by divesting it of all its reifying constraints (hours,
hierarchy, productivity), which reflect its subordination to capital
and which, so far, have determined the essence of what is currently
known as 'work'. To change it by reconciling it with a culture of daily
life, an art of living, which it would both extend and nourish, instead
of being cut off from them. 37 To change it by the way it will be appro-
priated from childhood onwards, when it will be possible no longer
to suffer it as a penance, but to live it as an activity merged in the
flow of life, a path to the full development of the sehses, towards
Moving Beyond Wage-Based Society 99
power over oneself and the external world, and as a bond with
others. To change it from childhood onwards by linking the acquisi-
tion of knowledge with a pride in being able to do things (this was
a conception already developed by Blonski, among others, at the end
of the nineteenth century). It is not hard to imagine considerable
advances in this direction by combining (self-)teaching with group
ecological, social and cultural projects. Work, study, experiment,
exchange, artistic practice and personal fulfilment would all go hand
in hand here, with people quite naturally being accorded a basic
income at the end of adolescence. 38
We might envisage this income, which would at first be partial,
becoming a full one as the adolescents acquired and developed
ranges of competence by taking on practical tasks of increasing diver-
sity, complexity and skill, in community activities - and particularly
in the public services - alongside their 'studies'. 'Work' might then
become quite naturally one of the dimensions of life, accompanied
by and alternating with a range of other activities in which 'pro-
ductivity' is not a consideration, though those activities would con-
tribute indirectly to the productivity of labour by way of the
creative, imaginative and expressive capacities they developed.
Rainer Zoll recently proposed a transitional formula for moving
in this direction. As they reach the end of adolescence, citizens could
each sign up for a variable period in a voluntary civilian service offer-
ing a choice from a wide range of activities of an ecological, social
or cultural nature. This service - which would bestow greater social
respect for being voluntary - 'the productivity of which would not be
measurable in economic terms' and which, as a consequence, 'must
not be regarded as commodity labour to be remunerated with a
wage', would allow considerable scope for initiative on the part of
the volunteers in determining their tasks and their hours. It
would entitle the volunteers to a 'citizenship income', providing
them with a 'normal standard of living' not just during their period
of service but for a period two or three times its length: 'For example,
two or three years' service would entitle the volunteers to four or
five more years' social income, without any other obligation on their
part.' 39
Zoll's prescription can be seen as a variant of the Danish scheme.
Like the latter, it proposes a conditional social income linked to a
period of work, without claiming to be able to measure the corre-
sponding quantity of work. One might envisage a scheme in which
 100 Moving Beyond Wage-Based Society
such periods of voluntary service were repeated throughout a
person's working life; in which some public services would operate
with voluntary labour; and in which bonuses were added to the basic
social income to reflect the experience and qualifications of the vol-
unteer, and the length and intensity of his/her involvement.
Changing the city
We have to see the guarantee of a basic social income and the expan-
sion of disposable time not as something which would reduce activ-
ity, but as a way of increasing it. Their purpose is not to exempt
people from doing anything at all, but to open up possibilities for
everyone to engage in atwhole host of individual or collective, private
or public activities - activities which no longer need to be profitable
in order to flourish. From childhood onwards, everyone is to be
involved in, and feel the attraction of, a general proliferation of
groups, teams, workshops, clubs, co-operatives, associations and
networks, all seeking to recruit him/her into their activities and
projects. Artistic, political, scientific, ecosophic, sporting, craft and
relational activities; self-providing, work on repairing and restoring
the natural and cultural heritage, im~oving the environment, energy
saving; creches, 'health shops', networks for the exchange of services,
for mutual aid and assistance, etc.
These self-activities, which are self-organized, self-managed, vol-
untary and open to everyone, must not be perceived as lamely sup-
plementing the capitalist market economy, nor as an obligatory quid
pro quo for the basic income which makes them possible. With qo
need of capital, no need to valorize capital and certainly no need
that the wants and desires they aim to satisfy be backed by money,
they may be called on to take the social time and space which the
reduction in the volume of work frees up out of capitalist, market
logic. They may be called on, too, to supplant wage-working to a very
large extent and to create, beyond that form, free, associative social
bonds; to become hegemonic and, to that end, to be spaces of resis-
tance to the powers that be, spaces for experiment, for mounting a
practical challenge to our crumbling society, for developing alterna-
tive socialities, and social alternatives to that society.
Urban policy can give a decisive boost to this ferment of varied
self-activity, in which the project for a new and different society
Moving Beyond Wage-Based Society
can begin to take shape and become aware of itself Thro
organization of space and social time, through the facilities, ameni-
ties and sites it puts at their disposal, urban policy calls upon people
to develop these activities, provides them with the resources they
need, confirms them as the kinds of activity a society struggling
to emerge expects from everyone. It reflects them back to them-
selves not as ephemeral improvisations or tame palliatives adopted
for want of something better, but as a common endeavour in
which all may share, a project in which new social relations are to
be developed. .
Where policies on time and cities are concerned, many useful
ideas have been developed in the Netherlands and Denmark. Why
do 37 per cent of the Dutch- 70 per cent of women and more than
l 7 per cent of men- opt to work part-time, even though their wages
are reduced proportionately, without any compensation? Why do 22
per cent of the men still working full-time want to change to part-
time, even if it means earning less, whereas only 4 per cent of women
and men working part-time want to work longer? Why is it that in
their eyes the use-value of the time spent not working is greater than
the exchange-value of the time spent doing paid work (i.e. than the
extra money they could earn)?
We might guess that the density of the urban fabric has a lot to
do with it, and that the layout of towns and cities, the architecture,
the collective amenities and public transport are designed in such
a way as to facilitate self-activity, interaction, creation and co-
operation. Herbert Marcuse was fond of saying, 'After the revolu-
tion, we shall tear down the cities and rebuild them.' By changing
towns and cities, we shall provide a lever for social change and for
a change in the way people relate to one another and live out their
essential belonging to the world. The reconstitution of a liveable life-
world presupposes clearly laid-out, polycentric towns and cities, in
which each district or neighbourhood offers a range of sites access-
ible to everyone at any time for self-activities, self-providing, self-
directed learning, exchanges of services and knowledge; a profusion
of day nurseries, parks, meeting places, sports grounds, gymnasiums,
workshops, music rooms, schools, theatres and libraries; dwelling-
houses with meeting places and walkways, play areas for children,
restaurant/kitchens for the old or the disabled, etc. .
There are many of these features in the model which the town
of Parthenay has been developing since the early l980s. 40 In
 102 Moving Beyond Wage-Based Society
Copenhagen and Bologna, to~ many such aspects are present. Felix
Guattari writes that:
New modes of domestic life, new practices of neighbourliness, edu-
cation, culture, sport, childcare, care for the elderly and the sick ...
are within our grasp, as are new social values and a new style of activ-
ity. The only thing missing is the desire and the political resolve to
take on such changes ...
Will we have to wait for overall political changes before under-
taking 'molecular revolutions' of this kind, which are to contribute to
changing mentalities? We are in a cleft stick here: on the one hand,
society, politics and the economy can evolve only if there is a change
of mentalities, whilst, on the other, mentalities cannot really change
unless society as a whole undergoes change. The large-scale social
experimentation we advocate will be one of the ways out of that con-
tradiction. A few successful experiments in creating new living spaces
would have significant consequences in stimulating a general resolve
for change ...
The point is to construct something ... providing every opportu-
nity for the potential mutations which will lead coming generations
to live, feel and think differently. The quality of the production of
this new subjectivity should become the primary goal of human
activitiesY
In fact, as we saw in chapter 3, mentalities or, rather, sensibilities
are already changing, and with them the system of values. But this
cultural change remains a personal, private matter for each individ-
ual, so long as it is not translated into a new organization of social
space moulded by that change and allowing it to express itself, to be
objectified in new ways of acting and living in society. It is a matter
of changing towns and cities so that the 'new subjectivity' is no
longer merely a change in 'my head' or 'my heart' - a change which
the dominant social discourse denies or represses - so that this
change can be embodied in the material world, in practices and dis-
courses, can develop a dynamic which carries it beyond its initial
intentions and turns it into a common project, into the 'general will'.
Local Exchange Trading Systems (LETS)
As both a crisis measure and a source of 'new subjectivity', Local
Exchange Trading Systems (LETS) are among the best examples of
large-scale social experimentation. They represent an 'exodus' from
Moving Beyond Wage-Based Society 103
present social arrangements, producing new socialities beyond the
power of the state and money. LETS were invented during the 1920s
in Germany and developed in various forms in the USA during the
great depression of the 1930s. Since the end of the eighties, they
have been spreading in a new form in Europe, North America and
Australia. They are called Systemes d'echange locaux (SELs) in France
and Kooperationsringe (co-operative circles) in Germany, but the
most dynamic expansion has been in Great Britain, largely thanks to
the efforts of Michael Linton, the founder of Manchester LETS. 42
LETS or co-operative circles (circle being a much more appro-
priate title than 'system') are a potentially radical response to the
impossibility, as a result of unemployment, for large masses of
workers of selling their labour power. They respond to this situation
by putting economic exchange on a quite different footing. To sell
their labour power for money, workers need an 'employer' capable
of paying them and selling on the labour 'employed' to a customer
who is able to pay for it. But why should labour always be 'employed'
by someone who does not perform it? Why should it always pass
through the commodity form - and hence through money - to be
exchanged, recognized, valued? Why shouldn't the members of a
community exchange their work without intermediaries, 'in the
most rational and human way possible' (Marx), by tailoring the
goods and services produced as directly as possible to needs and
desires which are themselves expressed without any intermediary?
The question is as old as the labour movement and unemploy-
ment and the workers' movement has always attempted to find a
solution by eliminating the intermediaries who come between the
workers and their products, and then between those products and
those wh9. need them. But that elimination has many disadvantages
if it mer~ly means reverting to payments in kind - a return to barter.
For barter has to be done 'on the spot', one thing being exchanged
for another. It permits only of specific, determinate exchange
between two determinate persons who, unless they know each other
well, do not afford each other credit.
The Local Exchange Trading System or co-operative circle elimi-
nates these disadvantages by creating a work-money or time-money
which makes it possible to exchange any service or product against
any other. In this it resembles money, though it is not money and
has none of its powers. This is the revolutionary aspect of the
formula.
 104 Moving Beyond Wage-Based Society
The founding principle of a circle is that everyone is 'solvent',
since everyone has capacities, skills or talents which others may need.
They may; moreover, develop those skills and acquire others if given
the opportunity. It is with this 'immaterial capital' that they join a
'co-operative circle'. This begins by granting them credit and they
may call on the services of other members as and when they need
them. Every hour of work - or its equivalent - which they receive
from a member represents a debt they will have to pay off within
a certain period (most often between three months and one year)
by an hour of work for any of the other members of the network.
The co-operative circle is, therefore, a mutualist network, based on
what Claus Offe and Rolf Heinze accurately refer to as 'serial
reciprocity'. 43
From the outset, co-operative circles took from the co-operative
movement the principle of the equality of their members, and of the
equivalence and equal dignity of their members' work. Every hour
worked entitles one to receive an hour's work in return, or its equiva-
lent, while every hour of work received represents a debt of one
44
hour. A computer record of each member's current balance is easy
to maintain, that balance being expressed in time-money ('time
dollars' in the USA) with the unit of time most often being the hour.
Unlike official money, however, time-money or work-money has
a short life and is limited in its convertibility: it has currency only
within the issuing circle (though the possible networking of several
circles is under discussion in Britain) and it loses its value if it is not
'spent' within three or six months, depending on the period set. It
must not, then, be hoarded. It must not allow some, by doing work
without ever asking for anything in return, to achieve a position of
almost unlimited credit over all the others and in that way - like
bankers or professional lenders - to acquire dominance.
Unlike the British labour exchanges of the nineteenth century,
which were based on the direct exchange of labour, co-operative
circles do not, therefore, abolish money, nor even the market. They
do, however, abolish the power of money, the blind 'law of the market',
and they make that market transparent. Given its short life, the local
money issued by a circle cannot be desired for its own sake. It cannot
serve to enrich some and impoverish others, nor can it play a part
in capitalist investment for profit. It cannot be used for the privative
appropriation of the wealth of the community. It limits private prop-
erty and each person's purchasing power to what he/she may take
Moving Beyond Wage-Based Society 105
for 'the use of [his/her] Family and a plentiful supply to its Con-
sumption' (Locke), whilst money, by enabling some to enrich them-
selves, enables the rich man to possess 'more ... than he himself can
use the product of'. 45
The short 'life' of local money thus encourages spending and self-
restraint at one and the same time. It provides an incentive for all
members of the scheme to put back into circulation the time-credit
they have acquired through their work, by themselves requesting
services from other members. But it also encourages everyone to
limit their consumption of other people's labour since they will have
to settle their debts within a limited time by providing services
themselves. Since it links all acquisition and consumption to an
expenditure of work and time, local money abolishes the fetishism
of mone)Lfthe appearance that whatever anyone can do, money can
do it better) and commodity fetishism, stimulates reflection on the
reality of needs and discourages waste. Its watchword could be 'to
each according to their needs, to each according to their work'.
Yet a third aspect explains political ecology's interest in co-
operative circles: local money encourages greater use of local
resources, products and services. Since it is exchangeable only within
a limited area, it boosts and develops the local economy, increases
the degree of self-sufficiency and the power the population can exert
on economic orientations and priorities. It spurs people to prioritize
the creation of use-values over the production of exchange-values.
The more members and varied skills a co-operative circle has, the
greater the proportion of trade it will be possible to transact in local
money, and this will tend to replace the official money. For example,
in El Paso (New Mexico) you can pay doctor's fees in time dollars;
in Ithaca (New York) most shopkeepers take 'green money'; in
certain Dutch towns, restaurants take the local money, as do some
banks in Britain.
A Swedish researcher, Nordal Akerman, who was one of the first
in Europe to take an interest in the eco-socially transformative
potential of co-operative circles, saw them as a means to 'shrink the
size of units in society and to make people active and in command
of the development'. He proposed linking the entire population in
every area with the co-operative movement by drawing up a list of
the needs which could be covered by local production - beginning
with needs for water, heating, foodstuffs, transport, basic textiles,
machines and waste disposal. He also suggested drawing up 'a list of
106 Moving Beyond Wage-Based Society
all those small things that would help to make life in the local com-
munities more active, rewarding and pleasant. This could be done
through local referendums where people would be asked to make a
choice of some 20-30 items and have the possibility of adding five
to ten of their own suggestions.' 46
The co-operative circle must not be conceived, then, as an iso-
lated measure, for the use of the unemployed and the marginalized.
If this were the case, it would merely be papering over the cracks in
the system, and its local money would be seen from the outset as
'paupers' money'. Moreover, the services reciprocally provided
would be seen as gimmicks for 'keeping a lid on trouble spots', and
dismantling and privatizing public services and welfare provision.
And co-operative circles must also not be seen as attempts to get
back to the village economy. In fact, they will be at their most devel-
oped in a context where everyone is unconditionally guaranteed a
basic income, where everyone 'works' intermittently in the system
of macro-social exchange, acquiring, maintaining and developing
within that system skills which can also be used and traded at the
micro-social level, particularly in the local, co-operative production
of goods and services for local consumption. It is then conceivable
that the co-operators may club together to buy or hire high-
performance equipment or the parts and components to build such
equipment themselves. It is also conceivable that the productivity of
local self-providing activities - and also their quality - may be com-
parable or superior to that of existing large firms. Conceivable too
that the skill levels and degree of inventiveness of local teams may,
thanks to the continual interchange of ideas and competences and
th~intensity of communication and co-operation, exceed the level
met in industry.
On all these points, the initiatives of the Center for New Work
founded by Frithjof Bergmann have provided practical confirmation
which I did not expect to meet so soonY
The viability of a co-operative circle and its development depend
to a large extent on the speed with which it takes off This in turn
depends on the logistical support its founders are given by the local
authority. A number of left local authorities in Britain have created
LETS development officers to aid this process. This has largely
involved providing premises for LETS groups, and also workshops,
Moving Beyond Wage-Based Society 107
means of production, computer equipment, technical advice, train-
ing and learning opportunities and so on.
The spread of computerization gives a constant boost to the
potential of co-operative networks. Computers can be used to make
their management transparent and easy to monitor by all the
members. It is possible now for all the services offered and requested,
times of availability, and members' balances to be displayed perma-
nently on the Internet. This reduces, and may even eliminate, the
economies of scale by which in the past large-scale commercial pro-
duction swept aside local production and domestic self-providing. It
makes self-teaching and self-directed learning easier, and facilitates
possible co-ordination, specialization and exchanges between net-
works, which could, for example, pool their resources to acquire
more technically advanced equipment than would be within the
reach of a single network of just a few hundred members.
The co-operative circle may thus lead gradually to the collective
appropriation of the new technologies, including, Claus Haeffner sug-
gests, flexible computerized manufacturing systems which would be
acquired by the local authority on a hire-purchase basis, or which
its members would 'put together', in much the same way as com-
puter and mechanical equipment is recovered in the shanty towns
of Africa or South America and 'cannibalized' to meet local needs. 48
There is now no longer any great gulf between the performance of
the brand-marked production tools of industry and the tools a local
community can use for self-producing, after having produced those
tools themselves at a price which seems laughable by comparison
with that of branded products. In so far as such a gulf still does poten-
tially exist, it is (more than) compensated for by the greater satis-
faction the members of a circle derive from their co-operative
practice.
'Social-technocratic professionalization', as Offe and Heinze call
it, has discredited and suppressed vernacular skills and disqualified
people's capacity to take care of themselves, judge for themselves,
help each other and communicate. 49 Co-operative circles make it
possible to take back into the sphere of neighbourly relations at least
some of the services on which professional social services claim a
monopoly. Offe and Heinze cite the example of home care for the
temporarily disabled. But the short-term validity oflocal monies puts
those services which need to be provided reliably day after day for
 108 Moving Beyond Wage-Based Society
months or years, for people who cannot provide equivalent services
in return within the required time scale, beyond the scope of a circle.
This is the case, for example, with mothers' help services and home
\ help for the permanently disabled or the aged. Hence the idea,
summed up in the slogan 'from welfare state to welfare society', of
a social insurance system based on contributions of services rendered
rather than money. Fit pensioners could commit themselves to giving
regular assistance and care to the needy and thereby build up a credit
balance which they could draw on when they themselves need care
and assistance, wherever they are. Or the relatives of people with
care needs could pass on to them time-credits they have acquired
for this purpose. The result would be greater autonomy for the
persons in need of care. They would no longer need to call on the
goodwill and, most importantly, the availability of the members of
their family.
Such a system would clearly be of little value or advantage if it
depended on 'obligatory volunteering' and were aimed at disman-
tling social services and their public provision. Its goal must be to
keep people involved througho1lt their lives in the network of social
intercourse. The social value of co-operative circles does not lie
simply in the creation of 'utilities' which could not otherwise have
been produced and traded. It lies just as much in the demonstration
that, apart from money; there are other - more concrete and con-
vivial - currencies, sources of rights and accounting units. It lies in
establishing relations of fair, stable and continuous reciprocity, which
offer a haven from insecurity and uncertainty. It lies, as Jessen noted, ·
in the self-determination of the services rendered and received
and in the non-hierarchical character of the social relations of co-
operation and exchange. These 'sustain individuals' critical con-
sciousness and their dignity' and, unlike paid work, 'are experienced
as free and unalienated', as 'communicative relations exempt from
domination'. All of which are apt to reinforce in individuals a criti-
cal and militantly proactive attitude in respect of the organization
and quality of work within the capitalist company. 50
Reverting to the political
This brings us right back to the heart of our subject. In the co-
operative circles and the potential networking of those circles, we
Moving Beyond Wage-Based Society 109
see the beginnings of a practical critique of the job system. Each
circle is a collective whose members themselves take control of work
and its distribution, together with the specification, acquisition and
diffusion of knowledge, skills and techniques. Or they have, at least,
the potential to do this. This is a large-scale social experiment which
may offer those taking part an intimation of a different society and
economy, in which wage-labour, the power of money and the
supremacy of 'market laws' (though not markets themselves) are
abolished. They may obtain a glimpse of a society and an economy
freed from the rule of 'real abstraction', where it will no longer be
true to say that 'it doesn't matter what your work is, so long as you
have a job.'
As the field of their co-operation expands, will the 'associated pro-
ducers' in the circles still accept the constraints and limits set on
their self-organization and associative co-operation by the capitalist
organization of work, even when it takes the Toyotist form? Will they
still be willing to subordinate their capacities and skills to capital?
Will they, to 'earn a living', still continue to serve alien goals when,
by the transnational strategies of deterritorialized decision-makers,
they are denied the right to examine these critically - or even to
know what they are? Will they still allow economic and technologi-
cal decisions to be made without public debate, or permit the state
and/or capital to exert their 'dictatorship over needs' and over the
model of consumption? Won't 'critical consciousness', fortified by a
practice of co-operation which is itself a practical critique, spill over
from the circles and invade companies, administrative authorities,
political apparatuses? Won't the capacity to produce science, and not
just apply it, lead to an increasingly radical challenge to the man-
darins and the institutions and industries that confiscate science and
research for their own benefit - a challenge which is already seen in
the self-help networks set up by cancer, diabetes and AIDS patients,
or drug-users, or in the consumer and ecology movements? These
too, it may be noted, are often transnational in nature.
I shall not venture to speculate here on the path this kind of revo-
lution may take, nor the possible links and mediations between the
local, micro-social sphere of co-operative communities and the
macro-society in which they remain immersed. It is impossible to
separate them theoretically and practically from the space which is
common to all of them, which connects them together and provides
for what they cannot achieve on their own. We have to accept that
110 Moving Beyond Wage-Based Society Moving Beyond Wage-Based Society 111
the problem of their relation to that space - which is nothing but universal aims, and to see their 'local common good' as the particu-
society itself, opened on to the world - does arise; that there is a lar local form of the 'general common good'. The political media-
need for, and a problem of, mediations between each local commu- tion is, in the last instance, merely the never-finished work of seeking
nity and society in general, and between communities themselves to promote the universal, to express needs in terms of political rights,
and societies themselves; that that problem and those mediations are while rendering the needs of each individual consonant with the
the problems of the political and of politics, which will not be made needs of all, and vice versa. 53
magically to fade away by communicative, consensual relations
between local communities. We must accept that the village com-
munity cannot be extended to planetary scale - and neither can the
self-managed co-operative. We must accept that the wealth of a
society and a civilization also depend on the existence of large ter-
ritorial collectivities, of cities which are large enough for highly spe-
cialized and minority activities to exist in them - for the existence
of cellists and Egyptologists, micro-surgeons and astrophysicists, psy-
chotherapists and judo teachers, etc. And it depends too on the exis-
tence of large-scale bodies and public services, such as universities
and research institutes, museums and shipyards, etc. And all this pre-
supposes that society will produce an accumulable 'economic
surplus', and that there will, therefore, be money functioning as a
universal equivalent, known and accepted rules applicable to all, and
consequently a legal code and system, an organ of co-ordination and
equalization, in short, the thing we call a state. 5 1
The 'system' cannot dissolve itself entirely into the 'life-world',
says Habermas. This means the public services and administrations
of complex modern societies cannot dissolve themselves entirely
into the communicative and consensual co-operation between com-
munities. It is, however, possible for productive co-operation and
self-organized social exchanges increasingly to take on a political
dimension, through which the insertion of local activities into their
wider context can be managed, so that the micro-social ensembles
can themselves assume a growing proportion of their mediations
with the social whole and become actors in macro-social decisions,
which will then come under pressure to link in with micro-
social activities. It is at this kind of feedback loop, connecting
the evolution of the system back to that of the life-world, each
spurring on the other, that Rainer Land has worked constantly, devel-
oping, among other things, the model for a politics of ecological
restructuring. 52
This two-way feedback leads - and indeed obliges - micro-social
ensembles to think out their own goals as local expressions of